Lesson 11 Flashcards
Piaget: Preoperational Thought (2-6 years)
Piaget refers to the second stage of cognitive development (ages 2-6 years) as that of Preoperational Thought. As you will see, this is a time when children are not able to consistently apply the rules of logic to their thinking or their behavior. Thus, in Piaget’s terms, these children are prelogical, or Preoperational.
General Information (Preoperational Thought)
The milestone of this period is the ability to think and to use symbols (i.e. symbolic thought). this will expand the child’s horizons in innumerable ways, including providing him/her the ability to think about, remember, and talk about what symbols represent.
What is Piaget’s focus on the ability to think and to use symbols?
Piaget actually focused on what children are not capable of,which he referred to as the limits of Preoperational thought.
Preoperational means prelogical—young children cannot consistently apply the rules of Ovid to their thoughts o their experiences. Remembering this will help you to better understand this stage of development; see my video for more information about this.
What are all of the characteristics of Preoperational Thought?
- Do not have concept of conservation
- Difficulty understanding change (static reasoning)
- Centration
- Classification
- Irreversibility
- Cause and Effect
- Egocentrism
No concept of conservation
Children in this stage are not aware that amount does not change just because appearance might. Understanding that amount is not affected by appearance is conservation, and this is a concept that Preoperational children do not yet have. Pouring liquid into a taller glass will mean more liquid to a child when it is the same amount of liquid.
Difficulty understanding change (static reasoning).
Preoperational children do not understand that change is gradual. For example, if you show a young boy a photograph of his father when ‘daddy’ was a little boy, it is likely that the child will be able to make any kind of connection between the child in the photograph and the father that he knows. Also, it wouldn’t be unusual for a four year old to tell you that on her next birthday she will be eight.
Centration
Preoperational children’s thinking is characterized by centration, which is the tendency to focus on one feature of a situation to the exclusion of all other features. With the above conservation example, the child focused on the height of the liquid to the exclusion of all other information about the liquid. For young children, the tallest person is assumed to e the oldest person (in other words, height=age and there are no other considerations). If a child does something ‘bad’ there’s no consideration that thi same child can also be ‘good’
Classification
Preoperational children have an imperfect sense of classification, meaning that their ability to create categories within their mins is not yet fully developed. The basic problem is that they cannot move easily between general categories and the subcategories within them.
For example, if you were to show a child an illustration with seven small circles and three large circles, it would be easy for the child to tell you that these were circles, and to distinguish between the ‘big’ circles and the ‘little’ circles. But if you were to ask the child: “Are there more big circles, little circles, or circles?” He/she would tell you there were more little circles because he/she would not e able to make the shift from the general category (circles) to the subcategories within it.
Irreversibility
Preoperational children ail to recognize that reversing a process might restore what existed before. An example might be putting a cherry on top of a child’s ice cream when the child didnt want a cherry. Not nay doesn’t the Preoperational child recognize that the cherry can be removed, Utah even aft it has been removed, the child might refuse to eat the ice cream because he/she believes that what has been done cannot be undone.
Cause and Effect
The Preoperational child does not easily understand the connection between events, their cause and/or their effects. Related to the notion of centration, one of the problems for the child is that he/she tends to focus on only one feature of a situation, in this case either the cause or the effect, but not both. As such he/she cannot easily make the link between the two. Additionally, recall that the main feature of this stage is the inability to consistently apply the rules of logic to thoughts or actions.
All of this would help us to understand why and how a young child can believe in Santa Claus. They are not sitting in their bedroom on Christmas Eve thinking: “lets see, there are 21 houses on my block alone. Multiply that by the number of houses in a one-mile radius, and that’s just the beginning. We could multiply that by some number to represent Salt Lake, but then there’s the whole state. An that’s just on state out of fifty, for one country! how can he possibly…”
Egocentrism
The young child sees the world through her own eyes and her own eyes only. In other words, the Preoperational child is not capable of understanding that other people might see the world in a way that is different from the way he or she sees the world. If you ask a Preoperational child why it snows, they’re likely to tell you it’s “so I can make a snowman.” Why does it get dark at night? “Because I have to sleep.” Also, because of egocentrism, if a young child hides their eyes, because they cannot see, they will assume that no one can see them!
As far as the young child is concerned, the world revolves around him (or her), and everything in the world is understood from this perspective. You must recognize that this is very different from being selfish.
Animism
Everything in the young child’s world is viewed as alive, with thoughts and emotions just like the child’s. So, for example, the sun gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night. The teddy bear cries and sucks its thumb. The baby doll needs a nap and to be fed. Because the child sees the world only through his own eyes ,the assumption is hat everything is as the child is.
Events like death, illness and divorce are difficult to understand
These life events are difficult enough for adults to understand. For young children, the difficulties are enormous. For on thing, children during this stage are very literal, which means that they interpret what they are told with exacting precision where the meanings of words are concerned. If someone close to them dies and they are told the death occurred because the person was ‘old’, the young child is likely to interpret this to mean that they should fear growing older and they might dread their next birthday because they know that birthdays are markers of growing older. If they are told that death occurred because the person was ‘sick’ the child likely will be very worried about dying the next time they are sick.
